Participant Recruitment through Social Media: Lessons Learned from a Qualitative Radicalization Study Using Facebook

Recruitment and Inclusion Criteria

We searched Facebook to find young people between 15 and 30 years old who showed extreme ideals on their profile. We interviewed adolescents and young adults with extreme right, radical Islamic, or extreme left-wing ideals. Our research focused on people with various types of extreme ideals, as growing evidence reveals that the processes of radicalization among widely divergent groups show parallel developments (Gielen 2008; Van San et al. 2013).

Procedure

Many researchers feel uncomfortable about revealing private information, especially when the research concerns people in the fields of radical politics or criminality. It may be tempting to use anonymous Facebook profiles to observe and contact potential respondents, but this goes against the ethical guidelines of research. Also, transparency is essential in building trust. A possible solution to proceed on Facebook would be to create a neutral researcher Facebook profile.

We created three of these Facebook accounts in which we presented ourselves as researchers. We chose neutral but explanatory names: For example, a name on one of our profiles was “PhD-student Utrecht.” On our profiles, we explained who we were and what our research was about. We generated separate profiles to approach different ideological groups. A single Facebook account would not have been sufficient because right-wing oriented people would certainly not trust a person who also shows interest in Islamists and has anarchistic Facebook friends. However, when we met the respondent face-to-face for an interview, we were open about our approach to people from a range of different ideologies.

Subsequently, we searched Facebook for respondents. We traced potential respondents by visiting relevant group pages. We found these group pages by using the following example key words in our search: Groene Vogels [Green birds], Shariah4Belgium, Shariah4Holland, Dutch Oi, Fitna, Anarchistische groep Amsterdam [Anarchistic group Amsterdam], Anti Dierproeven coalitie [Anti Animal Testing Coalition], Kraken gaat door [Squatting goes on]. We then visited these pages and selected people who posted messages on the group page or who “liked” extreme posts. We then looked at these people’s personal profiles and checked whether they were explicit about their ideals on their profile. For example, the adolescents and young adults were approached if their profiles showed adulation of martyrdom, white supremacy, or antigovernment claims.

Next, we sent potential respondents a private Facebook message to ask them for an interview. In this message, we explained who we were and the purpose of our study. Rather than using terms such as “radical ideals” (which might imply a security perspective that considered their ideals as unwanted and dangerous), we asked the potential participants about their “strong ideals.”

We had two reasons for using this approach: a theoretical one and a practical one. The theoretical reason was that a lot of research on radicalization is conducted from a security perspective (Schmid and Price 2011), in which scholars try to find ways of counteracting radicalization. From this perspective, young people who develop strong or extreme ideals are often considered to be radicals and are thought of as potential dangers to society. However, by simply considering adolescents and their ideals to be dangerous, one overlooks the fact that ideals, even radical ones, are part of a democratic discourse, and that some idealistic young people simply want to be actively involved in their communities (Van San et al. 2013). We therefore chose to approach our respondents as young people with strong ideals, rather than as radicals.

A practical reason for this approach was that we learned from previous research (Van San et al. 2013) that words like “radicalization” can stand in the way of finding respondents. However, our respondents were eager to talk to us when we told them about our parenting perspective and asked them about their strong ideals. The online use of words such as radicalization could also put the respondent at risk, as some may be monitored by security services.

Delicacy of wording in the recruitment message was important for obtaining trust. We stressed to our respondents that we are working for a university, as universities are usually perceived as neutral institutions. Moreover, we communicated that we are writing a book instead of doing research. We did not use the Dutch word for research, onderzoek, because it could also mean “investigation,” which has strong connotations with police and security services. In the text, we tried to avoid any normative judgments toward their ideologies and chose an open-minded approach. Moreover, we promised the respondents confidentiality and anonymity (see Figure 1).

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Recruitment text used in our research.

The people we interviewed were quite suspicious about the government, institutions, and researchers. It was therefore impractical to ask them to complete a written informed consent form. However, all our respondents gave verbal consent to participate in our research. We also received parental consent for participants who were between 16 and 18 years old. We anonymized all interviews to reduce any possible harm to the respondents by changing the interviewees’ names and leaving out details that could identify them. Furthermore, all participants were informed that they could contact us at any time for further questions and could terminate their participation in the research whenever they pleased. Two respondents did this.

Making Contact

When approaching a potential respondent, we usually sent one invitation message and after receiving a positive reply, one or two more messages were sent to arrange a time and place to meet for an interview. We found that it took far fewer messages to convince people with extreme Islamic ideals to participate in the research (usually just one), and a lot more messages if we approached young people with extreme left-wing ideals. In general, approximately four out of 10 messages were answered.

Although Facebook was very useful in helping us approach respondents with strong ideals, it did not enable us to approach all groups. Young people with extreme right-wing sympathies were, for example, difficult to find on Facebook. They seemed to prefer their own closed and anonymous community forums, such as Stormfront, rather than Facebook. When we tried to approach extreme right-wing respondents on Stormfront, all members were warned within the hour that researchers had tried to contact members. As noted in the forum, “Or maybe it was the Secret Service?”

We found that Facebook is a more open medium than group forums such as Stormfront in that all layers of society and different generations use Facebook. Adolescents and young adults with left-wing ideals and (converted) young Muslims were easy to find on Facebook. One might imagine that people with extreme ideals would keep their profiles private so as not to be discovered by the police or secret services, leaving the researcher with the less extreme public Facebook profiles. Contrary to this assumption, we found that a considerable number of the people with extreme left-wing and Islamic ideals had made their Facebook profiles public.

Convincing Respondents to Participate

One extreme left-wing female respondent we were trying to convince to participate in our research refused because she had seen our LinkedIn pages and found that one of our team members used to work for the local police as an administrator. So it is important to consider your online persona when approaching respondents who do not trust you.

Furthermore, we found that Islamic young people were especially enthusiastic about participating in our research when we approached them through Facebook. Their enthusiasm was possibly driven by their desire to perform Dawah (to spread the word of Allah) but possibly also by the sincere interest that the researchers showed in their ideals. Left-wing-oriented idealists, however, were easy to find but hard to convince to participate in our research. Afraid that it would be government-led research, they often refused involvement. However, in a few cases, the person was eventually persuaded to meet us after extensive messaging and chatting on Facebook. Despite the use of social media, fieldwork within radicalization research remains a long-term effort; a researcher has to be persistent.